11 Responses

Well, they clearly have an artist relations problem, earned or not. Maybe the fans are listening to the artists they love and not using Spotify, though that seems like shooting yourself in the foot when it’s just pushing them to Youtube instead.

people who care about artists and music may feel guilty, and of course with new entrants to the market like beats will also slow their roll… beats has no free tier, which means more money for musicians from fans who care.

Beats is a really interesting curated experience, and a completely different approach to streaming… it could be revolutionary, even. But I just wonder if you can be revolutionary with a paywall, or if the bigger revolution was giving everything away for $0 and some occasional ads.

Let’s see: Spotify and Rdio are totally expanding their free tiers; those that have refused (ie, Rhapsody) are not growing to the same degree. Then of course, you have YouTube pressing the price towards $0, while making it extremely challenging to charge $10/mo. for a better-arranged and neater collection.

Perhaps the magic answer comes in the Muve Music-style, all-inclusive mobile plan, though AT&T is undoubtedly taking its pound of flesh from Beats (just like every other mobile carrier).

All streamers, including subscription based web Radio, will bring at the best 1/2 billion subs @ $5 a month.
That will make just $30B /year. At that point there will be no iTunes or Amazon MP3 and Tube style advertising smoke around free music will add net 5 billion dollars. Actually this net 5 for ads is questionable due to unavoidable shrinkage of conventional Radio – which is made of pure advertising.

Our destiny with current psycho games is 35B dollar industry in 2025.

As we speak 100 billion dollars of music goodwill is shredded to 17B joke by French owned British operated circus, Sony very busy to generate billion dollar loss in current fiscal year and one Russian oligarch.

Time to wake up – the money for all, including the streamers, is in Discovery Moment Monetization.

Sad to see you go, especially since this is a fairly simple ‘statistics’ exercise. It plots subscriber announcements made by Spotify, then plots the growth (in absolute terms) over the time period. Pretty simple.